diff --git a/symposion/markdown_parser.py b/symposion/markdown_parser.py
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..07216c2a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/symposion/markdown_parser.py
@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+import html5lib
+from html5lib import html5parser, sanitizer
+
+import markdown
+
+
+def parse(text):
+    
+    # First run through the Markdown parser
+    text = markdown.markdown(text, extensions=["extra"], safe_mode=False)
+    
+    # Sanitize using html5lib
+    bits = []
+    parser = html5parser.HTMLParser(tokenizer=sanitizer.HTMLSanitizer)
+    for token in parser.parseFragment(text).childNodes:
+        bits.append(token.toxml())
+    return "".join(bits)